I wonder if that is the reason why we are living in the age of misinformation.
Twitter has not as aggressively monetized with advertising as FB has, I wonder if we will see the same soon.
You need someone with brains and decency (not just luck) to run the company.
Because they are the toxicity.
What does that mean?
The medium is the message and Twitter is curt, prone to exaggeration / outrageous / mean spirited content.... and the people on there EAT IT UP.
What is going to mature?
I suggest Matthew 7:5 for them.
Often they fall off the wagon and get into spats and so on. Too much hassle to constantly add / remove folks to keep a feed that isn't "typical social media feed BS".
The main cost is that this isn't conducive to a very large following list, but perhaps that's a good thing.
At that point I just didn't find it worth it even visiting. Finding more didn't seem like something I wanted to do.
I also do get a trickle of new accounts. I recognize a name after appreciating their threads a few times, and then click through to their profile and read a bit to increase my sample size. If it turns out I got a skewed sample, I unfollow them using the same process I described above.
This process really feels like almost no work, and I've gotten enormous benefits from it. Most concretely, it's been trivial to frontrun traditional media and public health recommendations by several months during the entirety of the pandemic. I can pretty much credit my Twitter feed with myself and my extended family getting through the pandemic much more safely and healthily (incl mental health) than we likely would otherwise have.
The downside (maybe upside) is that I run out of Twitter content pretty fast.
Dorsey was probably the biggest advocate for free speech amongst the CEOs of any major company & Twitter is significantly less toxic than Facebook partly because of him. I fully expect his removal to lead the company in a more dystopian direction.
Like someone regularly posting obvious lies and bs?
I feel like I need an exact example from every person when the topic comes up, and that's not really easy to do.
They have many tools to do this. Promoting certain viewpoints & hiding others in feeds, manipulation of trending topics, various degrees of shadowbanning, blacklisting specific links or images, etc.
None of this is regulated and there’s no real transparency. It’s dangerous and I expect it to continue to get worse.
I completely disagree.
Complaining about censorship because someone can't post some lies and vitriol targeting someone is far different than someone posting some well thought out ideas and getting them removed.
Shaping the tenor of public discourse while also claiming that one is not legally a publisher is not something we should allow in our society.
If you think this has anything to do with merely 'lies' or flaming, you're not keeping up.
That's kinda why I talk about having to ask for exact examples... I still have no clue what exactly you think is being censored.
One reason avoiding censorship is so important is that a lot of times, the truth is trampled by doing so. Remember Galileo. And while it is being trampled, guess what the truth is called? "Lies".
I honestly have trouble following where you're going. I'm not aware of any effort to censor Galileo at this point. If that is the case I'd like to hear about it.
People "regularly posting obvious lies and bs" is, definitionally, not censorship. Censorship can only take place when something isn't said, not when it is.
> I think facts exist and people can do damage spreading lies, threats, hate, and etc.
You'd probably be very hard pressed, particularly on this website but even just in general, to find anyone who disagreed with this statement in a vacuum. But even beyond the (very much not straightforward) problem of who gets to decide what's a fact, there are people, myself included, who agree that damage is done in the way you mentioned, but believe that even worse damage is done by censorship.
The person you're responding to is clearly not referring to any effort to censor Galileo today. They are observing that he was censored by the authoritative figures of his day for spreading what was then considered "obvious lies and BS", because of the amount of "damage" he was supposedly doing. But of course, it turned out he was much more correct than the people who censored him. This begs the question of why we should believe the authoritative figures of today are any more likely to be wholly correct about what is a lie and what is damaging than the authoritative figures of yesterday, and whether they'll trample over the truth in their attempts to suppress lies.
Hopefully you can now follow where the conversation is going.
For the sake of not dismissing your question entirely though, even though I believe it's not the right question to ask, I'll offer up the covid lab leak theory and everyone who argued in favor of it. Decried as a racist conspiracy theory and actively censored from social media for over a year, but now accepted as at least plausible, even probable.
He's saying Galileo was censored during the time Galileo was alive.
I'm not certain if that exists much today. Similar censorship would be curtailing mockery of public authority figures.
- Possible therapies for COVID like ivermectin or HCQ
- Claims that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was swung via fraud
- Hunter Biden's laptop [edit: had D. Trump here but that's covered by above]
I'm fairly confident that you have, yet have decided to be obtuse. If you haven't then maybe you aren't the right person to opine about censorship on Twitter.
Also weirdly enough, Galileo was censored because he insulted the pope, not because of his theories on heliocentricity. Galileo tainted (part) of his objective scientific truth by injecting his own biased personal vendetta into it.
What's bs to you, may not be to someone else. Speech is way larger than just facts. I wouldn't want to live in a society where opinions are not allowed.
Free speech is important and it's already not including violence (eg. Screaming fire in a crowded place is a crime and not covered by free speech). We don't need tech politicised censors on their platforms-not-platforms and we don't need hate speech restrictions.
That doesn't make it not BS.
I think facts are real things.
If you want the fact can be "The New Yorker claims these photos of Hunter Biden smoking crack are real".
Despite that, the article was censored on Big Tech's platforms and the NYT called it unsubstantiated. 9 months later they conveniently removed "unsubstantiated" from their article.
But don't worry, all is good, it obviously wasn't election manipulation /s https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1437453951046127629
It's funny to note how Big Tech's didn't censor posts about Russiagate, which actually ended up being unsubstantiated.
So it's not actually "trending" it's Twitter™ Approved Trending®.
Censoring things they know are trending because of arbitrary reasons is a pretty good example.
A public square filled with nation state actors influencing the volume and contents of the subjects of discussion in the public square are doing more to inhibit free speech than any technological solution owned by a social media platform. Corporate censorship is a lot easier to fight, as users can walk or investors can react when things are not matching the desired effect. It's not perfect, but better than an open-ended "everything free" world where it can be manipulated by those with the right resources (in my opinion).
What we need is for people to get a lot more creative with how to create, support, and sustain free speech online without relying on millennia old concepts which do not map to our current problems quite well.
stock is back to where it was a week ago, and is still lower than most of the year. These headlines are meaningless.
They've been making progress in the last year or two but I suspect most people think they could be doing more...
The line is a bullshit TV talking point to rationalize (to the markets) an abrupt 180 by one of the characters.
Edit: The submission to HN was before the tweet. Huh? I guess it originally linked to somewhere else.